Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Drummer droid evolves its mojo...

As a drummer (in a former life) I got pretty tired of completely lame jokes that went with occupying the drum stool. For example: "Question: What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? Answer: A drummer".

Now it looks like an innovative drumming robot might have had enough of all the stick, too. It's ditched its sticks in favour of a more melodic ? not to mention computationally intensive ? activity.

As you might recall from this story published last year, a robot called Haile was programmed by Gil Weinberg and colleagues at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, US, to listen to the rhythm played by a human drummer and mimic it. It could even improvise around the drum pattern by dividing, multiplying or skipping beats. It sounded just great and the drummer droid went down a storm at the 2006 Computer Human Interaction conference in Montreal, Canada.

Gil and his team have done it again. The same robot can now listen to a human saxophone player and respond with free form xylophone improvisations in real time. It can even handle long pauses and fill in just fine. You can see and hear Haile's latest performance here.

The secret is a genetic algorithm. A piece of software that, alongside a bit of know-how about musical counterpoint and harmony, breeds the most-likely-to-be-harmonious answering phrases to a piece of music. It's a musical form of "directed evolution" and you can read more about how it works here.

OK, so Haile isn't going to be playing the 100 Club anytime soon, but I think it's really getting there. Take a look at the clip and tell us what you think. And if you know any jokes about robot musicians, do share them...